Tag: featured

Going Deep

Unplugging the Lobo Club Matrix

By Daniel Libit

How much should you spend on a gift for a retiring college athletic director?

For the University of New Mexico Lobo Club, the answer to that question, as it came to pass last August, was $412. 

According to a copy of the organization’s expense records, that is the amount the Lobo Club paid to buy former UNM AD Paul Krebs a handcrafted, solid maple ass-pedestal from Standard Chair of Gardner. The purchase was designated, “Miscellaneous”.

Now, mind you, there were some extenuating circumstances surrounding Krebs’s departure.

He was not so much retiring, in the affirmative sense, as he was resigning under intensifying pressure over a 2015 Scottish golf trip he had arranged for himself and some Lobo boosters, which had fallen under the scrutiny of the Offices of the New Mexico State Auditor and Attorney General. That burgeoning scandal — and a contemporaneous one involving the discovery of nearly a half-million dollars of unpaid luxury suite revenue for UNM men’s basketball games — had now fully breached the levees of the Lobo Club.

In due course, the controversies would put an embattled Lobo athletic director and UNM’s bedraggled sports booster group at a tense, face-saving impasse.

Little known to anyone outside the Lobo Club’s Executive Committee is that Krebs had already been spearheading an effort, months in the making, to officially do away with the organization.

At points last summer, before all hell broke loose, this looked to be the direction things were headed: the Lobo Club was going to be officially swallowed up by the UNM Foundation.

But alas, before you can get rid of the Lobo Club, you first have to understand what the Lobo Club is. Continue reading “Unplugging the Lobo Club Matrix” →

What about Bob

The DB Who Dimed Out Davie

By Daniel Libit

“There are so many others who want to speak up, but are afraid to,” read the email sent August 9 to the University of New Mexico’s interim Athletic Director Janice Ruggiero and interim President Chaouki Abdallah.

The sender was Jadon Boatright, a junior cornerback on the UNM football team, who was supposed to be a key anchor to the Lobos’ defensive unit.

But now he was asserting himself into a different role: team informant. Continue reading “The DB Who Dimed Out Davie” →

What about Bob

Inside the Bob Davie Investigation

By Daniel Libit

On January 18, 2013, an anonymous letter signed by “Senior Football Players” was sent to UNM President Bob Frank, which raised a series of inflammatory accusations against University of New Mexico football coach Bob Davie.

Among its charges, the letter said Davie evinced a racist attitude towards the black players on his team, while showing favoritism to white players. It alleged that the coach had gotten into a physical altercation with a black player during halftime of a game, in which both men ended up on the ground. It spoke of rampant drug use on the team and complained that the drug-testing process had been compromised by Davie. It called out then-Athletic Director Paul Krebs for ignoring issues when they were brought to his attention.

It concluded with a desperate, if ominous, plea: “Please address, it’s to [sic] late for us.” Continue reading “Inside the Bob Davie Investigation” →

Going Deep

The Petty Politics of Loboland

By Daniel Libit

On January 26, 2015, Craig Neal went to Santa Fe to collect a check.

At a press conference in the rotunda of The Roundhouse, Gov. Susana Martinez presented the University of New Mexico men’s basketball coach with a $10,000 donation to the “Pink Pack,” a cancer charity founded by Hugh Greenwood, the Lobos’ starting guard.

The next day, a photograph from the ceremony appeared, below-the-fold, on the front of the Albuquerque Journal’s sports section.

The image showed the governor and the coach standing face-to-face, staring intently into each other’s eyes: Neal’s right hand rests insouciantly on Martinez’s left shoulder, as she gazes up at him with a tight-lipped smile.

The picture captured, among other things, an increasingly rare sign of comity between the state’s chief executive and its largest university. But Neal was a special exception. Continue reading “The Petty Politics of Loboland” →